Perryscope 7 PERRYSCOPE 7, February 2021, is an issue of the personalzine published, whenever the mood takes him, by Perry Middlemiss, 32 Elphin Grove, Hawthorn, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3122. E: [email protected] Produced initially for ANZAPA (the Australian and New Zealand Amateur Publishing Association) and then whoever else unlucky enough to receive it. Also available for download at efanzines.com with thanks to Bill Burns. Unless otherwise specified all material is written by me. Cover by W. H. Chong. INTRODUCTION And so another year flashes by. Seeming so slow when it was running yet so brief on looking back. It’s not one that I want to spend too much time contemplating. For all its tragedy and upset it wasn’t as bad for me as for others, even though I lost my father. Others came out of it much worse. On the brighter side of the ledger I personally made it through relatively the same, though there is slightly more of me this year than last. I was able to rekindle some old interests to fill my retirement time and read a fair number of books. My immediate family are all well and in employment and I am not – employed that is. So pluses on both sides there. Like everyone else I have great hopes that 2021 will be better. I look forward to politics being quieter, and humanity being kinder and more gentle on the earth. I suspect I will be disappointed. Such is life. WHAT'S HAPPENING IN MY LIFE MY READING IN 2020 2020 is a year most will want to forget. From what I can gather, from reading newspaper articles and listening to podcasts, a lot of people really struggled to get into any sort of reading regime at all during the year, citing their anxiety and worry about the state of the world. I didn’t have that sort of problem. I had a few flat months (May, November and December) when my reading didn’t hit the number of books I would have liked but I’m aware of why that happened, and it had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was also a year when my reading habits or patterns changed away from a lot of time spent on public transport during a working week to sitting on the couch in retirement. That meant more books read on paper and fewer on the e-reader, more old books off the shelf and fewer Page 2 February 2021 Perryscope 7 new purchases, and certainly many fewer anthologies. That’s not a bad thing, just a difference in the pattern and something to be aware of. As mentioned in previous issues of this fanzine I always like to set myself targets, an overall number and then a series of targets for sub-categories. I’m fully aware that I probably won’t meet the bulk of these aims when I start out on a year’s reading, it’s just a little exercise I set for myself to keep me on track. The overall number for 2020 was a target of 102, up by 6 from 2019. I did well there passing that figure on October 28 with Piranesi by Susanna Clarke and finally hitting a figure of 119 books read in the year. That is up by 10 over 2019’s total of 109, yet not back to the sum of 128 I managed in 2018. That is now starting to look rather like an outlier in this statistical domain. It’s my aim to be able to finally settle on a figure of 120 a year. Given this year’s performance I’m looking at this being the best I will be able to manage. The bulk of the extra books read this year were read as a result of programming choices for the podcast I co-host, TWO CHAIRS TALKING. Through the year we had run a number of episodes devoted to the Hugo Awards of the early 1960s, deciding early on that, in order to provide the best overview of the year in question, we really needed to read all of the novels and shorter fiction works that appeared on each ballot. As a result we went from reading one novel and one short piece to four or five entries in each category for each episode. I don’t begrudge that reading time (though we did decide later in the year to spread the episodes out a little) but it did tend to skew my reading more towards older genre fiction, specifically to older science fiction written by older white males. In 2019 I read 63 books out of 109 that could be considered genre (ie science fiction, fantasy, or horror) and 76 out of 119 in 2020. Crime fiction reading was down a lot: from 27 in 2019 to only 15 in 2020. Again due to moving the emphasis to more genre. And then non-genre books went up from 14 (2019) to 18 (2020). Swings and roundabouts. Digging deeper I find that the number of books re-read for the second, third or whatever time, went from 19 in 2019 to 28 in 2020; pretty much indicating the difference in the two years in just one stat. I am quite happy to admit that the way I keep the statistics relating to my reading in a year is overly obsessive and that it isn’t for everyone. Yet as I get more into assessing my reading habits and looking back over a year’s literary intake I find myself thinking that it is a definite advantage. How else could I know that I spoke about 76 different books on the podcast during the year? Or that I read half of the books on paper? Uninteresting? Not to me. BEST BOOKS OF 2020 As previously I’ll split these into categories and then provide an overall “Best Of the Year” at the end. Generally books will only make this list if I gave them a rating of 4.0/5.0 or more. David Grigg and I did a lot of reading of “older” science fiction novels for the podcast during the year. Hence we felt the need to split the SF category into “old” and “new” in order to have Page 3 February 2021 Perryscope 7 a proper differentiation. There was some good stuff read in this category, but also a lot that was probably better left unread. SF (old) Novels read: 14 5 Dune World by Frank Herbert (1964) 4.5 4 Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964) 4.7 3 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962) 4.7 2 A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr (1960) 4.8 1 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969) 4.9 Notes on the winner: Probably my favourite sf novel of all time. Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970. Discussed in our first anniversary episode of the podcast. Genly Ai is an ambassador from the inter-planetary Ekumen, a confederacy of human-inhabited planets, to the planet Winter. Each of these planets was “seeded” many millennia ago by the Hainish people. Now an attempt is being made to re-establish diplomatic contact between the planets. But Ai struggles with the planetary politics and the ambi-sexual nature of the planet’s inhabitants. A major work in the history of the field. I don’t hold with the idea of an sf canon that must be read. Though if I did this would be the first book on it. Honourable mentions: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (1970) 4.3 Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky (1977) 4.0 The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith (1964) 4.0 SF (new) Novels read: 26 5 Ghost Species by James Bradley (2020) 4.2 4 The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (2019) 4.6 3 A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2019) 4.6 2 Infinite Detail by Tim Maugham (2019) 4.7 1 The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020) 4.8 Notes on the winner: this came in very late in the year – mid-December. Thereby justifying my waiting until the year has turned before reflecting backwards. It may well be Robinson’s best book in his long career. From statements that he has made recently it looks like it might be his last. I hope not. From the evidence presented here Robinson certainly has a lot more to offer. Honourable mentions: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (2019) 4.0 A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (2019) 4.0 I was suitably impressed with this category, probably more so than many other observers. The quality of the novels drops away quite quickly here in comparison with the SF (old) category, but that is to be expected given we are picking the “best” of the older novels to read. Page 4 February 2021 Perryscope 7 The Robinson was the standout for me, though I suspect not for a lot of others. I doubt it will feature highly in the awards’ lists in 2021. Fantasy Novels read: 6 3 Middlegame by Seanan McGuire (2019) 4.2 2 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020) 4.4 1 Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin (2006) 4.6 Notes on the winner: Volume 2 of the Annals of the Western Shore. The fictional city of Ansul is invaded and overthrown by the Alds, who believe the written word to be evil, though they revere spoken story-telling.